Meet the Editors

Publisher and Executive Editor Philip K. Jason is the author or editor of several books. From 1973 to 2001, he taught English and Creative Writing at United States Naval Academy. Allen Mendenhall is a writer, attorney, and educator. He has taught in a university, a law school, a penitentiary, and a Japanese private school. RIGHT: Photographs by VanessaK Photography, LLC.

The Southern Literary Review celebrates southern authors and their contributions to American literature. We feature the classic writers who have defined southern literature, and we highlight emerging authors through interviews, profiles, and book reviews. In an effort to back independent bookstores and to encourage creativity in the publishing world, SLR is an IndieBound supporter.

Reviewed by Johnnie Bernhard Hans Christian Anderson wrote, “To travel is to live.” His words suggest the underlying theme of Dancing to an Irish Reel by Claire Fullerton. Living, instead of existing, is exactly what protagonist Hailey Crossan does on the west coast of Ireland. Leaving the “soullessness of Los Angeles” and her job in […]

AM: Thanks for doing this interview, Colleen. Your first novel is Everybody Needs a Bridge, which you describe as a “work of fiction inspired by actual events.” It follows the story of Erin, a young girl in Alabama who’s growing up roughly a generation after the Civil Rights Movement. You might call it a bildungsroman […]

Reviewed by Kathleen M. Rodgers Can a savior come in the form of a sixteen-year-old girl in a green prom dress and cat-eyed glasses? A phenomenal debut novel by gifted storyteller J. C. Sasser, Gradle Bird flips southern gothic fiction on its head and turns ghosts stories inside out. Forget everything you thought you knew […]

Kathleen M. Rodgers’s stories and essays have appeared in Family Circle Magazine, Military Times, and in anthologies published by McGraw-Hill, University of Nebraska Press / Potomac Books, Health Communications, Inc., AMG Publishers, and Press 53. In 2014, Rodgers was named a Distinguished Alumna of Tarrant County College / NE Campus. Three of her aviation poems […]

The $5,000 Crook’s Corner Book Prize is awarded annually for best debut novel set in the American South (author may live anywhere). Books published between January 1, 2017 and May 15, 2018 may be submitted by authors or publishers. Self-published books are eligible, but e-books are not. Young adult books are not eligible. $35 entry […]

Essay by Kerstin W. Shands Gail Godwin’s new novel Grief Cottage (2017) is set in coastal South Carolina, an area rich in history, legend, and tradition. Evoking a real place and a real environment, Pawleys Island and the Isle of Palms, this novel introduces us to Grief Cottage, a profoundly charged site, a metaphorical rendezvous […]

Essay by Richard Rankin Among Robert Ruark’s (1915-1965) complete body of work as a prolific, high-profile newspaper and magazine journalist and bestselling novelist, perhaps his most enduring literary accomplishments are his two sporting classics, The Old Man and the Boy (1957) and The Old Man’s Boy Grows Older (1961). Created from a series of highly […]

Richard Rankin has been the Anderson Davis Warlick Head of School at Gaston Day School for the last 17 years. He is the author of several books, including While There Were Still Wild Birds: A Personal History of Southern Quail Hunting, which is forthcoming in May 2018 with Mercer University Press. He holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He and his wife, Sarah […]